Deferred maintenance could swamp budgets.

• Author: McKinley, Craig R.
• Position: President's Perspective

Nearly everyone is familiar with the old adage, "An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure." It is one of those universal and enduring truths that millions of us implicitly acknowledge when we get an annual physical, take our car in for its scheduled service or repair the roof on our house after a few shingles fall off after a storm.

But, for a multitude of reasons--none of them convincing or persuasive--we don't practice this logical and simple concept when managing our defense infrastructure.

A report came out recently revealing that when it comes to facility and infrastructure management, the Air Force has had to accept a "patch and mend" strategy for the numerous installations it operates around the world. What could that mean? In essence, it means that the Air Force can't apply preventative procedures to key facilities and infrastructure. Instead, it defers needed and predicted maintenance and repairs until things actually break or otherwise become unusable.

Why has the Air Force adopted this approach? I can assure you it is not because its leaders are unfamiliar with the concept of scheduled, preventative maintenance and repair. And it is not because they are unfamiliar with concepts such as performance-based logistics and predicted failure rates. It is simply because they do not have the funding needed to execute a preferred alternative approach. The result has been excess costs incurred when making repairs, and a decrease in availability while awaiting them.

A few examples have recently been reported in the defense media. At Malmstrom Air Force Base, Montana, a building floor collapsed forcing a six-month stoppage in the repair of important nuclear components. At Tinker Air Force Base, Oklahoma, an obsolete electrical sub-station exploded cutting off power to numerous depot buildings, and resulting in millions of dollars in repairs and lost productivity. In this business, "lost productivity" is a soft way of describing "lost operational capability."

In simple terms, although the Air Force received all the money it asked for in the fiscal year 2016 budget for infrastructure and facilities maintenance, it did not have a sufficient topline allocation. As a group, the military services only requested about 80 percent of the funding they actually needed to perform necessary sustainment and infrastructure maintenance. This means that some 20 percent of needed maintenance is being deferred, which creates two interconnected problems.

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